The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

If a device would save in time just 10 per cent. or increase results 10 per 
cent., then its absence is always a 10 per cent. tax. If the time of a person is 
worth fifty cents an hour, a 10 per cent. saving is worth five cents an hour. If 
the owner of a skyscraper could increase his income 10 per cent., he would 
willingly pay half the increase just to know how. The reason why he owns a 
skyscraper is that science has proved that certain materials, used in a given 
way, can save space and increase rental incomes. A building thirty stories 
high needs no more ground space than one five stories high. Getting along 
with the old-style architecture costs the five-story man the income of twenty-
five floors. Save ten steps a day for each of twelve thousand employees and 
you will have saved fifty miles of wasted motion and misspent energy.

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60  •  The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work
Those are the principles on which the production of my plant was built 
up. They all come practically as of course. In the beginning we tried to get 
machinists. As the necessity for production increased it became apparent not 
only that enough machinists were not to be had, but also that skilled men 
were not necessary in production, and out of this grew a principle that I later 
want to present in full.
It is self-evident that a majority of the people in the world are not men-
tally—even if they are physically—capable of making a good living. That is, 
they are not capable of furnishing with their own hands a sufficient quantity 
of the goods which this world needs to be able to exchange their unaided 
product for the goods which they need. I have heard it said, in fact I believe it 
is quite a current thought, that we have taken skill out of work. We have not. 
We have put in skill. We have put a higher skill into planning, management, 
and tool building, and the results of that skill are enjoyed by the man who is 
not skilled. This I shall later enlarge on.
We have to recognize the unevenness in human mental equipments. If every 
job in our place required skill the place would never have existed. Sufficiently 
skilled men to the number needed could not have been trained in a hundred 
years. A million men working by hand could not even approximate our pres-
ent daily output. No one could manage a million men. But more important 
than that, the product of the unaided hands of those million men could not 
be sold at a price in consonance with buying power. And even if it were pos-
sible to imagine such an aggregation and imagine its management and cor-
relation, just think of the area that it would have to occupy! How many of the 
men would be engaged, not in producing, but in merely carrying from place 
to place what the other men had produced? I cannot see how under such 
conditions the men could possibly be paid more than ten or twenty cents a 
day—for of course it is not the employer who pays wages. He only handles the 
money. It is the product that pays the wages and it is the management that 
arranges the production so that the product may pay the wages.
The more economical methods of production did not begin all at once. They 
began gradually—just as we began gradually to make our own parts. “Model 
T” was the first motor that we made ourselves. The great economies began in 
assembling and then extended to other sections so that, while to-day we have 
skilled mechanics in plenty, they do not produce automobiles—they make 
it easy for others to produce them. Our skilled men are the tool makers, the 
experimental workmen, the machinists, and the pattern makers. They are 
as good as any men in the world—so good, indeed, that they should not be 
wasted in doing that which the machines they contrive can do better. The 
rank and file of men come to us unskilled; they learn their jobs within a few 
hours or a few days. If they do not learn within that time they will never be 
of any use to us. These men are, many of them, foreigners, and all that is 

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Getting into Production  •  61
required before they are taken on is that they should be potentially able to do 
enough work to pay the overhead charges on the floor space they occupy. They 
do not have to be able-bodied men. We have jobs that require great physical 
strength—although they are rapidly lessening; we have other jobs that require 
no strength whatsoever—jobs which, as far as strength is concerned, might be 
attended to by a child of three.
It is not possible, without going deeply into technical processes, to present 
the whole development of manufacturing, step by step, in the order in which 
each thing came about. I do not know that this could be done, because some-
thing has been happening nearly every day and nobody can keep track. Take 
at random a number of the changes. From them it is possible not only to gain 
some idea of what will happen when this world is put on a production basis, 
but also to see how much more we pay for things than we ought to, and how 
much lower wages are than they ought to be, and what a vast field remains 
to be explored. The Ford Company is only a little way along on the journey.